


Things Carried Long

by Pontmercyingtilthecowscomehome



Series: Hope Carried Long (Cassian/Leia) [3]
Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: But in the context of a loving and healthy relationship, Cassian Andor-centric, Complete, Everybody Lives, F/M, Happy Ending, Post-Rogue One, Pregnancy, Unplanned Pregnancy, cassian and leia are so cute together, literary ish, roughly in the area of the New Republic, slow burn kinda, that feel when you can't remember all of the language of your childhood
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-23
Updated: 2018-12-23
Packaged: 2019-09-25 03:51:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,620
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17113949
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pontmercyingtilthecowscomehome/pseuds/Pontmercyingtilthecowscomehome
Summary: After the Battle of Endor, and after a slow-burn relationship, Leia and Cassian find their way in a complicated universe, together. Leia just wishes she knew more of the secrets he keeps about his life on Fest, before he lost his home and joined the Rebellion. When they find out they're expecting, many things come to light.





	Things Carried Long

You could know someone for thirty years and never know all their secrets. At least, that’s what Leia’s father used to say. Bail, of course. Her father. The one who matters to her. She ignores any whisperings of her heart regarding Anakin, the man who apparently fathered her and Luke.

Because Anakin was also Darth Vader.

Because it’s impossible to call both men father when one destroyed the other.

Regardless, Bail’s quote seems fitting for Leia’s current relationship, and one night, she shares it with Cassian. But he just gives her a raised eyebrow and uses the opportunity to steal his pillow back.

Well, they have only had two decades together. The first as conspirators in the Rebellion and then, this past one decade, as lovers. More or less.  A few days later, (because sometimes he carries her words with him, turning them over like rocks made smooth by rivers) Cassian replies, “If you know someone, their secrets are yours to keep.”

He doesn’t say “If you know someone, they’ll share their secrets.”

He doesn’t say, “if you know someone, they’ll stop hiding things.”

Cassian only tells her that secrets are to be kept.

Like she keeps many things. Inside of Leia’s heart is the all that remains of Alderaan’s splendor, the torch of the Rebellion, and so, so many secrets shared with her by others. Leia has seen Luke Skywalker’s tears and held a shard of the Death Star in her hand. She has lived her whole life among heroes, never once imagining herself to be one. Perhaps it’s why she and Cassian fell together, the way they did.

During the war there had been no time for their slow-kindling romance. Instead, they’d had other partners, people who matched them in fire, in bravery, in sharpness. But when one takes off the holster and the uniform jacket, sometimes, one takes off a part of that sharp-edged need for passion, too.

That’s the only way Leia can describe what happened in those years after the Battle of Endor. How she and Cassian first started meeting for caf, and then, for drinks, and then, even slower… more. She had been busy as a leader in the nascent new Republic, and he was busy… falling to pieces in slow motion.

Sometimes Leia curses herself for not seeing it sooner. Other times, she knows that he would have never let her help if she’d tried to sooner. Instead, the timing had worked out… as well-timed as a breakdown could be.  It was three years ago now, that day she’d come back from a long day of campaigning to find Cassian still in her bed, the rise and fall of his chest the only motion. He’d never been a good sleeper, in those years they’d shared. But that one day that had morphed into two, and then, into three, he’d simply… laid there. Not sleeping. Not waking. Shaking sometimes, with tears he couldn’t quite surrender, with sobs he held deep inside his chest. Mumbling words she couldn’t quite understand.

Leia had dropped everything, abandoned her campaign for reelection, and thrown herself into his care. Not his healing, because she knew, even then, some wounds could never be healed, only managed. Together, they’d worked to lead him back toward reality, one shaking step at a time.

 

Much later, Leia would learn the break happened the day he’d had to turn in both his sniper scope and the lullaby pill that had always been in his uniform pocket.

Not because he’d done anything wrong (which apparently, the young officer charged with the task had said, over and over, to the shaking war hero) but because… there was no need for those weapons in the New Republic. Slowly, she had reminded him of all the other skills he has. His splicing, his repair work. His piloting skills. His six languages.

“Seven,” he’d countered. “Picked up Ra’vab’esh last year.”

“Two more than me, then.”  

“Maybe I should run for senator then.”

“Maybe you should.” She doesn’t tell him that the race is long over, her seat seceded to someone else. It hadn’t been important, in the end. Not as important as this.

“Think a few assassinations on my record will make them bat an eye?”

“No, I mean, run against me, and your opponent's biological father was Darth Vader, so…”

It’s not the first time he’s heard that, but it is the first time she’s been so flippant. He squeezes her hand. “You are not your blood. You are your family, and all you believe in.”

Leia squeezes his hand back, just as tight. His hand is as callused and scarred and gentle as the rest of him. “I believe in you.” But her saying that makes a line of pain appear on his forehead, so she changes the topic. “What are the languages?”

“Can’t you just pull up my dossier?”

“It’s been deleted, you know that.” She kisses the lines on his forehead, and then, kisses his nose, just to coax that tiny smile from him.

“Ra’vab’esh, Basic, Huttese, Mando'a, Coriani, Ubese, and High Aurebesh.”

The list had surprised her in more ways than one. “High Aurebe? Really?”

That makes him snort with derision. He says her schoolgirl nickname for the stodgy old language with a sarcastic drawl.  “Aurebe? You really did go to finishing school, didn’t you? Such a proper little nickname for the language of our legal system.” She tells him off in both that language and Huttese, and they’re both finally laughing as he rolls her beneath him. Neither of them speaks much of languages in the next hour, beyond the one they share of desire.

Leia never finds the right time to ask why he hadn’t included Festian in his list.

 

* * *

 

A year after he’d broken, and eight months after they’d left Coruscant together, Leia finds him asleep in his pilot’s chair. K-2S0 hadn’t joined them on this flight since they were headed to a planet still in the waves of revolt post Empire. It gives her a rare moment to watch him sleep, the way he must have on so many missions before this one. His dark eyelashes are so soft against his cheeks, and the tension has mostly left his body, although she knows he’d spring awake in seconds if she touched him. So, she doesn’t. She watches, imagining what he must have looked like sleeping as a child, as a young man, as the soldier she’d sent on missions without knowing how fragile he’d become.

Each moment in his life a chance for a different outcome. But every one of them, leading him to her here and now. If Alderaan hadn’t been destroyed, if Fest hadn’t fallen, neither of them would have become the people they were now. If she was queen, she would not have been able to wake each morning next to a battle-trained man who still slept with a holdout blaster and a knife in his boot. But if he still had a home, he would know how to sleep comfortably in a house, to trust that a window only provided a view and not a target for a sniper. That is if he’d ever had a loving home. He’s never mentioned one.

It’s pointless to consider such things now. They are who they are, and that is life.

So, Leia watches the man she loves sleep and hopes he is dreaming of better things. Shockingly, he hums a little, whispers a few words of a tune she doesn’t know, humming a little more. Leia’s heart stutters and then soars. It ’s a lullaby. Someone, somewhere, had once sung Cassian a lullaby, often enough that his heart still knows it in dreams.

A little while later, his eyes flutter open. He melts back into reality, taking in the console information first, checking for his blaster, and only after those two things are done does he look in her direction. “Good morning.”

She leans in and kisses his cheek. “You’ve only slept for a little while. It’s still standard nighttime.”

“Mm. Then, come to bed?” He stands, offers his hand, and leads her into the narrow bunk they’ve turned into a haven.

They kiss, long and slow, his hands exploring her body as if it is the first time. He’s always so gentle with her unless she requests otherwise, and she appreciates his patience more than any other gift. It’s hard, sometimes, for her, to be intimate, to let someone touch her. The scars left by the nights chained are not visible but are still real, even a decade later.

Leia brushes the locks of hair out of his eyes. There's a few streaks of silver amid the brown, but she finds that very dashing on him.  “You were singing a lovely song in your sleep.”

“Mm. Maybe there’s a droid still here. A tiny one, sent by Kay, making sure I’ll return to him.”

“It was definitely you.” No droid sang in Festian.

“Was not.”

“Was too. I’ll  wait right here for you to sleep, and then, I’ll record it.”

He kisses her shoulder, his beard bristling pleasantly against her skin. She’s threatened to cry if he ever shaves it off. “Go to sleep, princess.”

“You first, General.”

“Fine. Together, then.” he leans up to kiss her. “So neither has to surrender.”

“You truly are a tactical genius.” Together, she thinks, is a very good word for them.

  


Sometimes, Leia thinks they lived for each other, these days. A replacement for what the Rebellion they'd both lived for before. The Rebellion was his home. It had become her home, too, never in the way it had for him, because she had lost her planet all at once, and his had melted away like ice in summer. It was her home the way a dropped match becomes a blaze, sudden, wild, and overwhelming.

But she’d never been able to figure out what the Rebellion did for him, beyond give him a place to belong. It did not love him back, did not cherish him. Until the success at Scarif, she’d even say it had drained him, the way a vampiric Geonosian beetle attaches itself to prey, sucking away life bit by bit. Then, Scarif had made him a hero, and becoming a hero had made him become alone. Leia knew the feeling well. But they weren’t alone, anymore. Not in that sense of the word. They were alone, together, and they would just have to build a home, a fire, a reason to live, now that theirs was over.

Starting with the small thing of picking a home planet.

“Coruscant?” she suggests, idly staring at a map on her holopad. She’d lived there for most of the last decade, working on the skeletons of the New Republic. They hadn’t returned in a year, as important as both were to Leia, she had chosen Cassian over her ideals. She’d never told him that. One small secret, held between them like a promise.

“Noisy,” he replies. “Dagobah?”

“Are you insane?”

He shrugs, which makes her wince. “I’ve failed a few examinations, in my day.”

“Stop it, you sound old.”

“I am older than you.”

“Everyone’s older than me,” she retorts, rolling onto her back. The bed isn’t quite big enough for that maneuver and his arm reaches out, holding her in place. It’s the casual touches like that which show his affection, more than any words he’d ever use.

“I thought you and Skywalker were twins.”

“He’s the older one. Apparently. According to the Force.” Leia knows better than to scoff at the Force, but she does give it a bit of an eye roll while she surveys the maps. So many worlds, and none of them a place she feels she will belong. Her planet is gone. His, though… There’s been news of rebuilding there, of refugees returning. “What about F-”

“No!” There is real pain in his eyes, sudden and sharp, enough he pulls himself away to gain control of himself. His fists clench, unclench, clench again, and each movement, she hopes, brings him a little closer to the present day that his mind has yanked him away from. Cassian was not lying about his failed post-mission debriefings. But someone had been foolish and let him be interviewed by a droid...which was conveniently reprogrammed to give him a passing report. Leia knows that, now, and she blames herself for not stopping it then. There are just as many raw bits and loose circuits in him as there are in K-2SO.

Once his eyes are clear, he drops his head. “I’m sorry.”

“I understand,” she says. And for this, she does.

But there are many things about him she cannot understand. She can hold him when he cries out in the night, and kiss his brow when he whispers words in a language the Empire had sought to snuff out as sure as candlelight.

But she doesn’t know those words.

The one time she’d asked him what one meant, he’d simply said, “nothing that matters now,” and went to make breakfast.

 

* * *

 

They decide to visit Yavin IV. After all, Kes and Shara are there. Mutual friends who do not have the… weightiness of their respective friendships with others. A conversation with Han will never just be about how his flight was, and there’s nothing simple about Cassian’s interactions with Jyn. It’s easier visiting friends they fought with but never were intimate with.

Yavin IV has changed a great deal since Leia saw it last, and she marvels at the homesteads their ship flies over. The temples are still as vast and impressive as ever, but beneath them is life, bright and new.

“I used to climb those,” Cassian nods at one massive stone structure as they descend.

“And time yourself?”

“You know me so well.”

“His best time was seventeen minutes and sixteen seconds,” K-2S0 adds, from where he sits, grumpily, behind them. “Which you would know. If you actually knew him.”

“Kay. C’mon.” Cassian says.

“I am stating a fact. I have known you for much longer than her.”

Cassian opens his mouth to argue, but Leia cuts in like the diplomat she is. She leans back to pat the droid’s arm. “You do know him much better than me, you’re right.”

“Good. You should say that more often.”

Kes is delighted when their U-wing touches down. The man greets them with a large hug, pulling them both together, and then, spares a second hug for K-2SO, who informs him how useless hugs are.

That only makes Kes laugh again. “Cassian, Cassian, qué bolá?”

Leia forms the shapes of the words, while Cassian replies in as clipped of Galactic Basic as he can, “We’re fine. Thank you, for hosting.”

“We’re delighted to have you. We’ll let you settle in, and then, tonight, we’ll have a party.”  He elbows Cassian playfully. “A real cumbancha, no?”

Cassian’s smile tightens to a level she hasn’t seen since the last day he’d worn an Imperial uniform as a disguise. “Thank you, we’ll look forward to the party.”

They walk to the homestead that could be theirs if they choose it. Then, though  she knows it’s as smart as waving a steak in front of a rancor, she asks, “so, cumbancha means party?”

“No. Yes. I don’t…” He rakes his hand through his hair, tousling it. He’ll comb it and re-part it later, she knows. He never lets his composure slip for very long. “Sure,” he finally says. “Sure.”

K-2SO’s gears click and whirl as his processors compute the surrounding information. He’s a lot noisier than Threepio, but at least Leia finds him a little more humorous. Most times. “A cumbancha is not a term found in standard Festian, the language of-”

“Drop it, Kay.”

“Drop what, and where? I am not holding--”

“Just… don’t.” He sits down but doesn’t look at any of them. “I thought you deleted that data set.”

“The Princess might find it practical.”

“She doesn’t need to,” he retorts.

Leia clears her throat. “The princess is right here, and she also has a name.” She looks between the two of them, at the man who never says what he means and the droid who is so literal it can hurt, and sighs. “I’m going to the party.”

She’s glad she does because the party is delightful. Full of homemade food, rich with the smiles of the other settlers of the area, and everything she’d want in a home. She hears Basic as much as at least three other languages. This, she thinks, as a Bothan serves a Wookie a heaping plate of food from a buffet, is the dream the Rebellion has achieved. Here, on a world that could have suffered the same fate as her own. At the party, she eats and drinks and dances, fumbling a bit at first before Shara helps correct her moves. As they whirl, she sees Cassian in the shadows, leaning against the wall of a homestead, watching. The fire throws long shadows onto his already angular face, and Leia shivers. There is no warmth in his eyes. Whatever he is seeing, it is not home. He does not offer to dance, and takes no food from the buffet.

Later, K-2S0 will teach her all the different Festian expressions for a party.

Leia, though, doesn’t think she will ever use them.

 

In the end, they don’t settle on Yavin IV.  Neither of them is shocked. K-2SO is, well, perhaps more sparked than shocked,  thanks to a sneaky toddler named Poe who turned out to be quite clever with a hydrospanner.

Instead, they end up throwing holodarts at a projection. They’re both more than a little drunk, because neither of them expected Shara’s parting gift of wine to be quite so strong, and because neither of them drink much at all. In the privacy of their ship, Cassian wraps an arm around Leia’s waist, and then, squints at the map, aiming with his free hand. It’s one of those sets of gestures that feels so… him. The real him. The Cassian that is buried under a thousand masks. At this moment his face is relaxed and there is a fluid grace in his drunken movements that makes her blush. She thinks about telling him he looks like his father but doesn’t. She shouldn’t know about that. It’s one small secret she keeps from Cassian. Her research.

It was easier for her to find records of Jeron Andor, including his mugshot than it was for her to find a translation for the little song she’s caught Cassian singing when he’s concentrating, or when he's mostly asleep, or that one time she'd had a terrible fever and he'd stayed at her bedside. Sometimes, she wonders if he might not even know all the words.

Instead, she watches him aim the dart. It lands on a black hole far off from even the outer rim. Leia kisses his stubbly cheek.  “Not there.”

Instead of an answer, he spins her into his arms and says something lovely and rolling and utterly foreign. It’s beautiful, this secret he hides, and it’s not one she can find without him. So, she kisses him, trying to taste all the words he’ll never share.

* * *

  


Maybe the dart was accurate because they have as good of a chance at picking a place to homestead as they do of living in a black hole. They never quite settle down. Home, it turns out, is each other. It’s not quite a sappy thought, Leia decides because it reeks a little too much of codependency. They’re at their best when they’re protecting each other, and they’re at their worst when pushed to put their own needs first. So they travel through countless worlds, helping and fighting and rebuilding what they can. Most recently, they helped squash an imperial sympathy uprising in Buai, a watery planet with pink sand beaches. There, they’d stayed, more than strictly necessary, because they’d been given a house on the shore and permission to swim every day in water that tasted like sunlight and felt like an embrace.

Neither one realized the waters of Buai negated a fair number of organic hormone-based implants, especially the one Leia had been wearing since she came of age. The one implant, she thinks, that she really, really couldn’t afford to fail.

And yet, there’s no mistaking the lines on the test she took, once things added up to exactly one conclusion. She gives herself one moment. One second to close her eyes and feel the panic coursing through her body, the shouting voice that says she’s somehow both too old for this and that this is too soon. But wouldn’t it always have been too soon? There was never a right time for something like this. She squashes the panic down, locks it away with all the other fears she keeps hidden. Then, Leia goes to Cassian because he might keep secrets from her, but she’s determined to tell him everything she can. There will be no secrets on her side. Not if she can help it.

There’s a brief discussion, before agree what’s done is done. They’ll keep it. They’ll find a way to do this, just as they’ve found a way for everything before. They're good at problem-solving, they tell themselves, and they had... well, maybe not planned for this day, but not dreaded it, either.

“Our child,” she says, taking his hand. Cassian had handled the conversation so well, better than even she had expected. She can only hope it’s because he, like her, figures that there’s no right time for such a thing, but that this isn’t the worst timing, either. Then, he nods, just once, but it’s enough for her. “Ours.”

She hopes he knows how much that word means to her.

 

On a different remote planet, Luke tells her it’s all right. That the child she carries is fine and after all, unplanned--

Leia cuts him off. “If you are going to try to tell me getting knocked up is part of our heritage, I will break you so thoroughly that your little mechanical boyfriend won’t be able to put you back together.”

Cassian just says, “And I’ll tell Bodhi what you said, so he doesn’t try to.”

Luke backtracks. He does offer, “Bodhi and I could raise…”

“No.”

It’s Cassian who shuts her brother down this time, and Leia turns to him in surprise. “The baby is ours.” He says. “Besides, you two have adopted, what, twelve orphans now?”

“Just six.”

“And Baze and Chirrut have…

“A lot more. “ Luke laughs, as they all reflect on the pack of orphans the two men had acquired and are raising. “Well, the offer stands. I know you two aren’t really… the settling down type.”

“We’re not,” Cassian agrees. “But we are going to do this right. Together.” He takes Leia’s hand with a possessiveness that surprises her, just a little.

She smiles at her brother. “And you will be the doting uncle. You and Bodhi both.”

Luke nods. He’s not the farm boy he used to be, and the work it’s taken building a new Jedi temple has aged him. “She’ll make a fine Jedi, your daughter.”

Both spies and princesses are trained not to react to surprises, but they’ve been together too long to not share a look at look at the information Luke’s given them. Cassian shrugs. “The child is ours. Anything beyond that, we shall see what blossoms.”  If Leia had any doubt she’d loved him before, she knew at that moment she did. She’d heard the freedom he’d given their child, the depth of his love. Whoever the little one would become, they would be surrounded by love.

Just as Leia herself had. And Cassian, too? “Is it a tradition in Fest to--” she starts.

Cassian shakes his head. “There are no traditions there. Not anymore.”

Luke clears his throat. “Like I said…”

Is their damage so clear? Does Luke think they’ll be bad parents?

No. They’re the mission-oriented type. And they take to the task at hand like it’s a mission. After they leave Luke, and a much-more-excited-by-the-news Bodhi, they make plans, buy the necessary goods, even K-2SO downloads new information to assist, although Leia does beg him to please stop giving her daily updates on her circumference.

The only part of the plan they fail to discuss is anything involving traditions to raise their child with. They stick to topics like baby-proofing the old U-Wing and researching baby-carriers that buckle into pilots seats. It’s not Leia’s place to tell Cassian to share his past with the child in their future. As much as she wishes it was.

 

* * *

 

Weeks later, Leia finishes installing the crib to the side of the ship’s wall and wipes her face. Cassian is busy reading a report of some planet’s insurrection. He had offered to help with the crib but she’d just growled because damn it, she’d ordered this crib and she could build it.

“All set then?” he doesn’t look up. He might be afraid to.

“I think so.” They’ve worked for two weeks on making the small living space into a place for them and a child. Their child. The idea is terrifying and yet, still brings a smile to her face. Her hand rests on her belly. “I was thinking about Baila, for my father.”

There’s the tiniest quirk of a smile on his face, and his head tilts, just a bit. But he just says, “We’ll add it to the list.” It’s a running document, shared between the two of them. They’re better at sharing names than any of their other hopes for their child. Those, they both keep secret, quiet, safe.

“Cassian two-point-oh is my favorite,” Kay says.

“Not Leia model two?” Cassian retorts.

“I prefer your operating system to hers.”

Leia treasures the smile on Cassian’s face holds it inside like all the other secrets. Later, when Cassian goes to the cockpit, she’ll search through a dictionary of the language that he holds even tighter than his happiness.

Bailar. To Dance.

In her own mental list of the names they’ve both liked, she moves it up toward the top. But there’s another naming matter, one that she’d completely forgotten about. Their own.

 

It doesn’t come up for months, not until they’ve settled in for a few weeks on Coruscant, to get supplies and see old friends, and not until it’s a morning when neither of them feels much like moving out of their warm bed. Her head rests on his chest, his fingers idly combing through her long hair. It had surprised her, at first, ages ago, when she’d learned how much cold Captain Andor cherished physical touch, as long as no one else was watching. Now it is a secret she carries, a gift she can give him. It’s so easy for her to offer a squeeze of his shoulder or her hand resting on his thigh under the table. It’s so easy for Leia to love.

She knows it doesn’t come as easily to him, and loves him all the more for it.

The messenger droid beeps, stirring itself in the corner of the room. “Message for: C. ANDOR. Message for L. ORGANA. Message for C. AND-”

He chuckles, so softly she only feels it as a tremble of his body and not a sound.

“What?” she cranes her neck to look up at him. His eyes have crinkled in a way that makes her want to pounce if she was capable of pouncing, as pregnant as she is.

“I had a long mission once on…. Somewhere…” He closes his eyes, trying to remember. Most of the planets they’d sent him to had all started to become that name, confined to the blurry past.  She wonders if it’s the same for all the assassination targets they’d given him too.

“It doesn’t matter where.” She manages to lean up enough to kiss his cheek. “You don’t have to tell me.”

“Ah, no, it was just… the people there. They combined surnames, you see? Pushed them together to make new names. I just...realized how poorly ours sounds. Andgana? Orgor?” He grunts out both words like a Gamorrean guard.

She’s too busy laughing to think about it at first. Then, she blinks up at him. “Why, Captain Andor are you…”

He kisses her, then, rolling both of them on the bed, carefully but with a good deal of heat, he must have been hiding. “Not a captain anymore,” he whispers, more to himself than her. His kisses stay hot, roaming down her neck at the same time his hand sweeps upward, to rest against her core. “Just yours.” His fingers brush against her need, light like a feather, but offering so much more. Leia sighs with delight. He’s so very talented with his hands… and his mouth. So talented, in fact, she nearly forgets what she’d meant to ask him.

But she’s got a mind like a durasteel trap, and after, when he’s panting for breath and she is so delightfully warm and well-fucked, she nips his shoulder. “Was that you asking me to marry you?”

“That was me informing you our last names are rubbish together,” he retorts, but his fingers tangle in her hair, bringing her to him for one more kiss. “But if you’re asking…”

And she was.

Luckily for them, there are over twenty-seven planets that ask very little before performing a marriage ceremony for two consenting sentients.

 

That planet, they don’t pick on a whim. Cassian pilots their ship directly to a moon of Yas Arai, a planet closer to the Core than she’d expected him to pick. He points out the closer to the Core worlds, the more acceptable the legal papers. She kisses his cheek, even though they’re in public because he’s good at thinking of everything.

Because he’s always had to. Leia knows she’s excellent at planning, that her documents regarding this birth are better labeled than some nation’s tax audits, but that’s all big picture stuff. She’s a mess when it comes to details. She’s always had someone else to do them.

The courthouse passes them each a holopad with a form to fill out. Leia’s answers are careful. Slow. Cassian is done with the whole document before she’s completed the first five questions.

“And what name am I marrying?” she asks, teasingly. Her money is on Willix.

He just passes her the holopad so she can see his full name, Cassian Jeron Andor, the same one carved into the medal of honor he’s never worn, blazoned on the top of the page. Underneath though… “Coruscant?” she asks, surprised at his choice of homeworld. It had, after all, been the place of his breakdown, not his birth.

He shrugs. “As good as any.”

Leia had slowly, and painstakingly, transcribed the name of her beloved Alderaan. She writes it now in the old script of High Aurebesh, a fitting dedication, she thinks, to the beauty of a planet no one else will ever see.

Why not Fest, she wants to ask. Why not tell the truth?

But she knows, in the end, that doesn’t matter. Not when he’s giving her his full name, his full heart, not hiding behind the names he wears like masks.

Or shields.

The vows themselves are efficient and quick. They selected the handfasting from the various different options for a traditional sealing of vows, if only because Leia had seen it done once in a play and always found it romantic. The gold ribbon slides around both their hands, tightens. She looks up at him, delighted by the shy smile that had finally appeared on his usually somber face. There’s a little more grey in his hair than there had been last year, but he’s…. He’s her husband now. For better or worse. In secrets, and in honesty.

They’re given the ribbon to keep afterward (provided they pay the five credit fee) and Leia tucks it in a pocket. “I think I’d like to make a blanket for her,” she says, her free hand on her stomach. “And put the ribbon on it.”

“Going back to your embroidery, princess?”

“I never embroidered, don’t be ridiculous.” She shrugs. She doesn't tell him she had lessons, she just refused to listen to them. That's not a secret, not a real one. “I figured I could… learn. Somehow.”

“Ah yes, with all your spare time.” He opens the hatch to their ship and walks her inside to their home. As the hatch shuts behind them, his lips graze her temple in a soft kiss. “I thought you wanted to have that constitution edited for the Avua tribes before the birth.”

“Oh, I will.”

“And the charter? For the…”

“For the Mn’aaaha moons that are forming a parliament, yes. I’ll have time.”

“And you promised Chirrut you’d spend an hour a day meditating.” Cassian climbs into his captain’s chair, punching in coordinates. Despite being forty, he still tends to vault over the back of his chair to settle into work as quickly as possible. Leia, on the other hand, is stuck lumbering into the seat next to him.

“Working is meditation.”

“I think he hit me with his stick when you said that, last time.”

She laughs, buckling into her seat. “Ah yes,” she imitates the warrior-monks resonate voice. “The lesson will be learned by Cassian Andor as you are too hard-headed to learn it.”

“He meant too pregnant, didn’t he.’ Cassian replies, that narrow line appearing between his eyes. “That’s why… that’s why you went to talk to him.”

She shakes her head. “I felt off. That’s all. I mean. Yes. I think he knew before I did,” a fact too odd to consider too deeply, “but that wasn’t why I talked to him. You were the first I told.”

Now that the coordinates were entered, he pauses to squeeze her hand. Just for a moment. It’s his way of saying everything those vows had described, wordlessly, the way he’s always shown his love. Then, he moves and pulls down the lever for hyperspace. The stars streak beyond them. “So.” He leans back. “A charter. A constitution. Meditation. Your usual remote work for the Republic… and sewing.”

“Or weaving.”

“There’s no kriffing way we’re fitting a loom on here.”

“A…” oh. That was what weavers used, wasn’t it? “How do you know how big a loom is?”

He shrugs. “Seen them before.”

She falls silent. Waiting. Finally, he admits, “it was… it was common, in the winter.”  those few words are more than she’d ever heard of the place he’d spent his childhood. She tries to conjure an image from them combined with all of her research on Fest. Imagines a room with a large hearth, multiple looms, the chatter of adults… and what else?

She’d given up the research a month ago. Her holopad had been loaded with “Festian Traditions in the Pre-Clone Wars Era” and she’d accidentally dozed off and woke to find him looking down at the screen. He’d simply said, “they couldn’t even be bothered to use an accurate holophoto,” and went out to the cockpit. That night, he’d slept there, and not in bed with her.

Leia had run the depiction of the planet on the cover of the book through the net and learned it was a holophoto of Hoth, not Fest.

Today, though, he’d offered knowledge. Just a little. She tried to tease out a little more. “Did they teach you?”

He doesn’t answer. The silence stretches between them. Slowly, though, his hand reaches out, tucks a lock of hair behind her ear, as he says, “why don’t we plan for the birth on Naboo. Their medical care is good, and you said you liked the water.”

She knows what he means is both I love you and please don’t ask me any more.

* * *

  


Naboo is lovely, and even if it was picked for a less-than-wonderful reason (and the argument lingered in the air the first week), the two adapt quickly into a happy routine. They’re settled into a small apartment, their ship docked not too far away. It's nice, Leia thinks, that the U-Wing gets noticed these days, children running over to touch the ship that had once carried troops to so many worlds. She hopes military ships will fade into the past, but she's not foolish enough to believe that.

The royal palace glitters in the view from the window, and Leia spends most mornings sipping whatever healthy pretend-caf she’s allowed to have these days and staring up at the skyline.

Naboo doesn’t feel like home, but it does feel like peace, and that’s good enough.

Cassian knocks on the doorframe to announce himself since he’s never been able to break his habit of spy-silent steps. “Jyn and Bodhi sent presents.”

She smiles and nods at him. “I’m glad.” Glad too, that it all ended smoothly, for everyone involved. Cassian had told Leia, once, that he hadn’t any intimacy to give, not then, not when those two had needed it. So she was glad they had each other but more glad that she’d gotten to have Cassian when he was ready (at least mostly) to love.

No, that wasn’t the right word. He’d always loved. Now, though, he’d learned to trust. She glides (she refuses to call it waddling, even at two days beyond expected delivery) over to where the presents are assembled.

Cassian clears his throat. “I’m headed to the ‘fresher.”

He kisses her cheek as he leaves, and she doesn’t turn her head. Too busy skimming her hands over the various presents. She recognizes most, but there’s one…

It’s unwrapped, and plain, faded with age. A blanket with off-white tassels and what once must have been brilliant stripes of blue and green. _Cassian_ , the note reads. And it’s a real note, written by a lovely, practiced hand in a script that must have also come from a finishing school’s education. _We’ve only met a few times, but Davits spoke highly of you. He’d asked me, in his will, to ensure this got to you, and I can see no better time than now. Fondly, Mirala Draven._

Draven’s wife. A woman even Leia had never met. She’d heard the two spent most of their lives apart, and it had been a marriage of practicality, rather than love. But clearly, affection must have existed, for her to deliver such a thing.

There’s a sharp cracking noise, like bone against a wall, or… she doesn’t think. She just acts. Draws her pistol, and moves, as fast as she can, toward the bedroom, where Cassian had headed. Was it an ambush? An assassin?

But when she leans into the room, it’s just Cassian. Standing over a broken wooden framework. Tangled threads of red and orange yarn spill over the tile floor. He’s breathing hard, staring down at the broken loom.

“I’ll clean it up,” he says first, and then, sees the pistol. He’s not surprised, but he’s not happy either. “I am sorry for the scare.”

“Maybe it will jumpstart this baby’s exit,” she tries to joke, but there’s no humor in it.

And there’s no light in his eyes as he simply says, “I could not remember how to.”

Because he’d tried. Despite all his fears, all his nightmares, he’d tried to pull something from the past for her. The yellow ribbon from their wedding lays beneath all the wreckage.

Leia bends, trying to reach it, but he sweeps down first. Takes the ribbon, and then her hand, tying it gently around her wrist. She tries to ignore how much his fingers are trembling. “What if I am bad at this,” he begins. “As bad as I was at…” he nods down at the ruined loom.

She shakes her head. “You are good at loving, and that is the most important thing.”

 

She’s a week overdue, which the doctor tells her is normal for a firstborn. So all there is to do is wait. And worry. Cassian tries to help distract her and walks her to the cultural district for a play. “It’s in high Aurebe, your favorite.”

“You’ll never let me live that down.”

“Absolutely not.”

They hold hands through the whole play. Cassian does his best to pretend to pay attention, and had she not seen him pretend to listen to Ackbar’s long speeches, she might believe he was truly engrossed in the saga of the missing duchess.

To wake him up, just a little, she whispers the naughty rhymes she’d learned instead of proper High Aurebesh poetry. He blushes delightfully and whispers back, “just wait until I’m allowed to take you against the wall again.”

Of course, he says it in Ubesh, and that only turns her on even more.

After, they stroll out together, hand in hand. “Maraali?” she suggests, her free hand on her belly.

“We are not naming our daughter after a fictional character who never bothered to research facts before believing her brother was turned into a Urd-bat.”

“But other fictional characters are fine?’

“Maybe.”  

As they walk, they pass by a few buskers, two musicians, and then, a poet. As they walk, the poet changes to a different poem, clearly sensing or rather hearing something in their voice.

“Ah, hermano,” the man calls, before beginning, “Yo no te ofrezco regalos ni cosas de gran valor!”

Cassian recoils from the language as if it was a slap. Leia turns and places a credit in the man’s cup, before saying, “please, we do not… know that language. Maybe something in Basic?”

The man is happy enough to oblige, now that he’s been paid. Whatever singsong rhyme of a love sonnet he recites fades away as they pass. Leia knows better than to speak Cassian about it in the street. So, she waits until they’re in their apartment, and then, pulls him down, to kiss him, long, and hard.

“I love you,” she whispers. “I love you more than anything in any world.”

Cassian breathes her in, his fingers pressing against the small of her back, before whispering, “you have my whole heart.”

But not his whole past. Fest is a wound that threatens to tear them apart. She kisses him again, and again, trying so hard not to talk about this, but knowing they have to. It’s too big not to. “Cassian.” She takes his hand and places it on her full belly. Their daughter.  “This is what we carry. Not secrets. We carry our families... Kes, Jyn, Bodhi, how many others do you know who have lost their homes? Luke can go back to Tatooine, but he can never go home again.”

“It’s different.”

“No, it’s not.” She shakes her head. “You lost your home. I know. That’s why we fought, remember? We fought for peace. For hope.”

He nods, slowly. “We fought for the future.”

Leia places her small hand over his. “Here’s our future, whether we wanted it or not. Can’t we give her everything we’ve carried? Every treasure we’ve hidden from the world? What good is holding on to our memories until they fracture and break?”

He listens to her, and his lips graze her temple. “What if they’re already broken? The memories?”

“Then we’ll put them back together. Piece by piece.”

She will carry his secrets forever, without asking. But she cannot, she will not keep secrets from her child. Not after all the damage was done by that choice in her own past.

For one moment, she thinks that might be the end of things, that they’ve finally found their peace with all that lays beyond the day he’d joined the rebellion. And then, her resting hand on his turns into a death grip on his fingers.

His eyes grow wide. “Leia.”

“It’s… time.” she gasps out.

* * *

 

The labor is blessedly quick, and soon, Leia is holding her daughter in her arms, and her husband is sitting next to her. “That,” he says softly, “was more terrifying than any battle. Even Scarif.”

“Imagine how it must have felt over here,” she teases, but gently, catching his collar and bringing him in for a kiss. Tomorrow, family and friends will descend on them. Tonight, it’s just them. The two of them, and their daughter.

“Baila?” she suggests.

Cassian considers it. His hand, so callused from so many years of blasters, of climbing and fighting his way toward peace, is so gentle when it cups his daughter's tiny cheek. “I…”

But the fact he didn’t simply nod tells her all she needs to know. “Don’t like it.”

He swallows, and she sees him for a moment like he must have been that day he’d chosen to change Draven’s mission. The day he refused to shoot Galen Erso. It’s a dark thought for a birth day, but there’s no gain without loss. “Esperanza,” he finally says.

“How…”

“I saw you writing it.” he kisses Leia’s forehead first, and then their child’s. The baby fusses a little, not used to the brush of a beard. “You were right. As usual.”

“So the word means…” she begins. Leia had seen it in her research, and had copied it out, more than once, memorizing the characters. Just in case.

“You know the answer to that.” He takes the baby from her carefully. They’ve both practiced plenty of times with a properly weighted doll since the only things they’re used to cradling are blaster-shaped. “Don’t you?”

Cassian's right, of course. She wouldn’t have picked it if she hadn’t.  Leia wraps the faded blanket around the babe, draping it over her husband’s arm. The blanket is proof, as was the lullaby. He’d been loved. He is loved now, and they will share that love with their child. “Esperanza, then.”

Cassian nods. He looks so incredibly beautiful at that moment, their daughter pillowed against his narrow shoulder, his eyes closed, those long eyelashes mirrored on Esperanza’s tiny face. She’s never seen him hold a child before, and yet, it seems like the most natural thing in all the worlds. “Esperanza Organa,” he says.

She counters with, “Esperanza Andor-Organa.”

He just chuckles, knowing that’s a losing battle. “Big names for a little girl.”

“She’ll grow.”

Cassian opens one eye playfully, clearly taking in Leia’s short stature, before closing his eyes again, rocking Esperanza gently. “Listen, my daughter, your mother thinks you will be tall. You and I must do our very best not to disappoint her. You’ll eat your vegetables, and I’ll remind your mother that some Ewoks are taller than her. Is that a deal, my Esperanza?”

Leia can do nothing but laugh. It’s a tiny thing, that he suggested the name. A tiny thing, and yet, the largest yet. It’s a word, and it’s a feeling. Hope.

 

The next weeks fly by, in a blur of visits and sleepless nights, of cries that send them both into an unpracticed panic, and tiny toothless gurgles that delight two battle-trained warriors. Anza, as she’s already been nicknamed by… someone (Had it been Han? It so would have been Han, to do such a thing) is a delight and soon cleared for life on a ship with her parents.

As they prepare, packing up all the gifts,  Leia finally says it. Neither of them has slept through the night in two months, and there’s no time left for dancing around topics. After all, they’d named their daughter for hope. Not for dancing.

“I want her to learn Festian.”

Cassian shakes his head, sharp and sudden.

“Cassian, it’s part of her life.”

“No. I am part of her life. I am not… that.”

She sighs. “It’s a language, Cassian. One that’s related to the second most used one among humanoids.”

“You sound like one of your books.”

“It’s a fact.”

“It’s a dead language, Leia. Dead like the planet. Dead like all of them.’

She shakes her head. “No. You’re alive, Cassian.” This is going all wrong. They can’t argue. Not with their daughter napping one room away. She steps closer, and her hand rests on his heart. “You live, and so, Fest, your family, everything, that lives in you.”

His eyes widen, but he doesn’t pull away.

“I’ve lost my home too. But I do not forget it. I bring it with me. I am Alderaan.”

“You are also the daughter of a queen.” He sighs and rests his chin on the top of her head. “Not the son of a mechanic turned dissident.”

“Mm. Must have been a damn good mechanic to teach his son to put hearts back together.”

Cassian chuckles, and it’s such a silent sound she can only feel it. “He was a romantic. That’s true. Always brought these little paper flowers home for Mama. To bring color into the cocina.” He tenses against her. “Shit.”

“Cassian,” Leia says again. “It’s all right.”

“It’s not. It’s not at all.”

Her hands slide down, to his narrow hips, holding him close. Refusing to let him hide now. Pressing her cheek hard against his chest, listening to his heart, and trying not to hear the barely held back sob in his voice.

“Talk to me,” she whispers. In any language, she wants to add.

“I don’t know it.” He finally says. “Not like you know home. Not like… not like home. It’s all faded, all broken. It’s gone.”

Leia pulls back, but only to look up into his eyes. For the first time, in as long as she’s ever known him, she sees tears in those warm eyes. Her thumbs stroke the tears away. She’d had no idea. He’s a codebreaker, a linguist. He knows more languages than any human she’s met. How could he have… How awful to have… Leia kisses him then, and he presses against her like it’s their last moment in the universe.

Finally, when he lets go, she whispers, “nothing we love is gone forever.”

 

They don’t speak of it again. They make the ship into their home, and resume their work, with the added joy and duty of raising their daughter. Cassian proves to be a far better father than he’d feared, and K-2SO declares tiny Esperanza to be a good enough reproduction of Cassian for the droid to approve of. He tells her bedtime stories full of statistics, and she gurgles at him in a way that makes him state she’s clearly the most intelligent human child in the galaxy.

Cassian takes to wearing Esperanza in a sling around his chest, which had been a gift from Shara and Kes. It delights Leia to no end to hear his soft voice telling his daughter all the parts of a ship’s hyperdrive, or explaining to her the conditions that might require a mask on certain planets.

At night, she and Cassian usually wake at the same time when their daughter fusses. Both are perhaps a little over-protective, and neither is that good at sleeping through the night anyway. But one night, Leia wakes to an empty bed. That used to be common, ages ago. When he didn’t know how to sleep with both eyes closed, when he could only rest for hours at a time, before patrolling the room again, checking for bugs and bombs from a war that has already faded from so many other’s minds.

But tonight, he’s not pacing. Instead, he’s watching their baby sleep. And softly, so softly, he’s singing. It’s the same song from so long ago, and it’s all she could ever ask for.

 

_Esta niña linda_

_que nació de noche_

_quiere que la lleven_

_a pasear en coche._

**Author's Note:**

> Comments welcome! Thank you to RogueShadows for betaing!  
> Also, go google the song lyrics if you'd like to cry to a lullaby. It's a real (and beautiful) one.


End file.
